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Oversight office says LANL operator safer than predecessor but still lacking
Since taking over in 2018, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s primary contractor is managing safety better than its predecessor but still has suffered unsafe mishaps and is grappling with ingrained problems that reduce efficiency and increase risks to workers, according to a government watchdog. Triad National Security LLC must improve a lab culture that often puts productivity ahead of safety, especially as it moves toward making plutonium triggers for warheads, the Government Accountability Office said in a report this month. The most significant “safety culture” issues can be seen at the lab’s plutonium facility, known as PF-4, the report said, noting this culture is defined by how it prioritizes the safety of workers, the public and the environment. The facility is in the midst of being overhauled to produce 30 bomb cores, or pits, yearly by 2026 to upgrade the nation’s nuclear arsenal. That is almost triple the volume of pits the lab has ever made in a year. The GAO interviewed officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration and drew on the agency’s yearly report cards on Triad’s performance. “A culture where efficiency is prioritized above safety still prevailed in some operations at PF-4,” the report said. “The officials also noted that expanding missions at LANL — to include numerous high hazard activities in PF-4 — may further exacerbate these cultural issues and challenge efforts to improve safety culture at the laboratory.” In an email, lab spokeswoman Jennifer Talhelm wrote the GAO’s report reflects the improvements Triad has made since 2018, particularly in safety performance and changing the culture. “We have work to do to continue to institutionalize those gains,” Talhelm wrote. “Safety is of the utmost importance, but culture does not change overnight, especially in our complex environment.” The lab now promotes learning to prevent errors and is working to close gaps in training, she wrote. The lab also is streamlining demands on managers so they can better oversee operations and is holding forums to solicit feedback from the workforce, Talhelm wrote. The report said a growing challenge is ensuring safety at a facility where plutonium work is being done alongside construction, especially as the workforce expands to ramp up pit production and makes the building more crowded. A longtime lab critic agreed increased congestion at the plutonium facility is a problem. “It’s a serious challenge to safety to do all those things at the same time in a small space with different kinds of people,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group. The larger workforce reflects the lab’s swelling budget, the GAO said. The proposed $4.6 billion to fund the lab in the next fiscal year is more than double the lab’s $2 million budget in 2018 — the year Triad became the main contractor, the report said. Triad, composed of Battelle Memorial Institute, the Texas A&M University System and the University of California, has shown a marked improvement over the lab’s previous operator, Los Alamos National Security LLC, the report said. The nuclear security agency decided not to renew Los Alamos National Security’s contract after repeated poor marks on yearly reviews and a string of hazardous incidents, GAO said. Among the incidents was an improperly packaged waste container that burst in 2014, releasing radioactive contaminants at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. The facility was closed for three years and required $2 billion to clean up. Under the previous contractor, the plutonium facility was shut down from 2013 to 2017 because of safety violations and a breakdown in worker discipline, the report said. Still, Triad’s record is far from spotless, GAO said. Triad failed to consider the full volatility of incompatible chemicals mixed with radioactive waste, the report said. It was referring to safety inspectors finding dozens, perhaps hundreds, of barrels of waste mixtures that potentially could explode. And last year, HEPA filters containing titanium welding shards were stuffed in a plastic bag, then placed with a metal object in a drum. The metal item tore the plastic, and the air entering the ripped bag oxidized the titanium, igniting sparks. Both situations involving improperly packed waste called up the memory of the breached container at WIPP, the report said. GAO also referred to Triad’s 2021 report card, which noted:
Triad managers have stated reducing mishaps is a long-term goal, and they have worked to institute more preventive measures, the report said. The former operator conducted flawed or incomplete analyses of safety problems and risks and rarely tried to gauge how well corrective measures worked, the report said. By contrast, Triad has granted line managers more authority to address certain problems and come up with solutions. Employee teams were formed to review samplings of corrective actions. At the same time, managers have begun to report incidents in which they were the main ones involved, the report said. The result is glitches being identified in advance rather than being caught by an inspector or escalating to a serious incident, GAO said. Mello contends the nuclear security agency, which is a primary source in the report, tends to go easy on Triad and the lab in its assessments. However, the agency noted in the report it’s very hard to find the necessary workers in the region, Mello said, calling that admission the most striking part of the findings. Cranking up pit production will be next to impossible without the necessary personnel, he said. “There aren’t enough qualified people in Northern New Mexico for LANL’s expansion,” Mello said. Comment by Greg Mello: Thank you Scott for this informative and in-depth article. I would like to add that it was NNSA, not me, which said (as GAO reports) that" Triad has already depleted the local talent pool in northern New Mexico." Sources have been telling us this for months. Chris Mechel's comment is wise and experienced. LANL should be closed. I have had a conversation with a former lab director who told me LANL was (at the time we spoke) twice the size it needed to be for the mission. (Now that would be 3 or even 4 times the size needed, in his very experienced view.) Back in the early 1950s, there were voices in the Atomic Energy Commission which wanted LANL closed, saying LANL was the wrong place for its work. Until 2018 there was not going to be an industrial pit mission at LANL. NNSA wisely thought it unlikely to succeed, or to succeed for long, and/or would not be cost-effective. That's still true. The dramatic expansion we see at LANL today is the result of a) our NM senators organizing Senate pressure on Trump, who was easy to pressure, and later b) the contractors and a neoconservative cabal in the Pentagon (which Biden has kept intact) blackmailing Trump using Inhofe, Liz Cheney, and others during the second impeachment ("give us a gigantic spending increase, in part to fund two pit factories, or we will have to assume you are a Putin stooge and vote against you"). A man who is now a senior federal nuclear safety official said to me in 2019, "Greg, we all know what is going to happen at LANL. They will go on until they have accidents and incidents that shut them down. We can only hope not too many people will be hurt." And so on it goes. This is not the 1990s or even the 2000s. NNSA and Triad know they are way, way out on a limb at LANL vis-a-vis pit production, and so have adopted policies of maximum opacity in order to spend as much as they can before the nuclear chickens come home to roost. The local NNSA office has not returned a phone call in 10 or more years. We exposed the stupidity of their last plan and they don't want that to happen again so they hunker down and keep digging their deep hole. The gigantic plans they have today -- about $16 billion more by 2033 -- will not be adequate, so expect even bigger plans in the future. Economic development from this? Dream on. Development for a few developers, ugliness, inequality, and degradation for many. |
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